System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells published by Tor 2023
This is the 7th or so book in the Murderbot Diaries, so if you haven’t read these, you should go start at the beginning, as this volume rightly jumps into the action immediately without introducing the characters, including Murderbot itself.
Our favorite, broadcast-drama-obsessed, autonomous human+synthetic Security Unit is back in another round of saving humans from bad situations on planets with sketchy alien contamination!
Murderbot has even more on its mind than usual, because of a recent incident that is undermining its confidence. Confident or not, there are murderous agriculture-bots, scary ruins, evil human-enslaving corporations, and the constant threat of alien contamination that can’t wait for Murderbot to even pretend to get comfortable. Which Murderbot would not convincingly pretend anyway, despite its practice routines about imitating full humans.
I continue to appreciate the alien contamination threat that lurks in the background. The idea that ancient civilizations left behind tools to perpetuate their societies, only to have them accidentally infect later civilizations whose individuals AND machines go on to build crazy stuff under their influence… It intrigues me. There is so much potential for trouble there!
I also like Wells’ vision of nearly constant communication channels, so that information/situations/data can be shared so efficiently. I mean, I hate it in my current life, because all of those channels are filled with people who want something at work, but I love it in the wandering through abandoned ruins on unfamiliar planets practicality way. Good communication tools could support actually good communication – it could happen!
The humor, the debates about which kinds of hatches are scariest, the swearing / sarcasm / name-calling – it all gives the relationships between the characters a warmth that shows Murderbot is building meaningful relationships, especially with other machine intelligences.
This is another fun read from Wells, and a satisfying adventure.
The Neri Oxman Material Ecology Catalogue edited by Emily Hall and Jennifer Liese published by The Museum of Modern Art, NY (MoMA) 2020
Art exhibitions are a special sort of book, and I was excited to obtain this one after having missed the exhibit at MoMA (because: COVID).
The curator’s essay notes that architecture has its movements and manifestos, and that Speculative Critical Design, which could include Oxman and her lab’s practice, “has featured earnest but inconsequential exercises and clichéd storytelling,” which could honestly be a summary of nearly every architectural movement/manifesto (I could stop the sentence here) that hasn’t delivered a robust body of work. Oxman’s written philosophical content can provide insights, but appears intended to produce a shell of theory for the practical purposes of funding an experimental practice. You can gloss over it, admire the design of the catalog itself (modeled in tribute to Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog), and then look at the interesting experiments and models that Oxman and her teams have produced.
Oxman produces attractive art objects that show off the potential of experimental, available natural materials. To utilize these materials, different fabrication methods involving both showy robots and insects are attractively documented, so that the processes behind the forming of materials is clear.
There is a tiny caption in an image “the shellfish industry produces more than 1 million tons of chitin-based waste per year,” and suddenly the context of the many forms and pieces involving chitin is clear. We have abundant supplies of materials that are the byproduct of other industries, which could offer opportunities to escape our petroleum and plastic-based problems.
The emphases on responsible material use, experimental manufacturing, and artistically documented processes interest and please me. Displays of models and experiments charm me (in a way similar to Studio Olafur Eliasson’s geometric model shop), though these models often have forms suggesting industrious insects made them, or perhaps volcanic springs formed them over time – and I mean that as a compliment. There are a few pieces that aren’t as tightly conceptualized to appeal to me (the death masks, for example), but the results are attractive, and they aren’t here to please me alone, so I won’t complain.
This is an attractive, well-designed catalog that shows off intelligent and attractive materials engineering experiments. I appreciate Oxman’s innovative work and overall practice, which is very STEAMY (in the putting the Art back into STEM way).
I have several books in storage that I started reading before the move to my temporary apartment, and will likely need to start over when I get to unpack them. I have a long reading list of newer and older things that are waiting for my attention.
But what else am I reading, aside from daily news at WaPo and the UK Guardian, plus some posts on Mastodon (which I visit weekly-ish, only to fall into various research rabbit holes)?
The book I am most likely to stay up late reading: System Collapse (the Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells. I love Murderbot!
II have finished a few manga I haven’t written about yet. (Next weekend, maybe?)
Reading in progress, in no particular order:
Claymore (manga on viz.com) by Norihiro, a very dark dystopian fantasy with swordfighting women super-soldiers fighting monsters. I’m in chapter 51-ish, and can read through the end, as the story is complete a couple hundred chapters from now.
Designing Japan: A Future Built on Aesthetics (non-fiction physical book) by Kenya Hara. 1/3 of the way through.
I Became a Sitter for the Obsessive Villains (manga at tappytoon.com) by Seongyeong oh, Yeoram, & i singna: a classic Tappytoon woke-up-in-a-book story, ongoing serial publication.
I Became the Villainess in a Disastrous Novel (manga at tappytoon.com) by Hagyeoon, Geoguri, & Yoonrim (heroine wakes up in a book with a bad ending and tries to leave town), ongoing serial publication.
There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (fiction physical book) by Kikuko Tsumura. A few chapters in, I’ll need to start over when I’m in the mood for reading about someone watching surveillance video!
To My Husband’s Mistress (manga at tappytoon.com) by Lachic, Dancingbrain, Nessa (abused young wife’s revenge plot with a hot, rich, arrogant male accomplice), ongoing serial publication, not many chapters available.
I have started and stopped several manga that are not my cup of tea. While very few aren’t drawn consistently well (rare for published work!), there are some that start well but eventually all the girls are showering for no reason that advances the plot; they are nothing but fight scenes; they are about a video game, and a bit too much like playing one in which you respawn and have to replay the same levels; or they start strongly as a revenge tale, but somehow wind up having entire chapters that are discussions about… royal politics and agriculture??!? I won’t write about those. There are more fun things to write about!
I have abandoned a few audiobooks, but subscribe to support a local bookstore, so I’ll be back on that horse soon. I have several digital books that I will read if ever my eyes aren’t so tired from staring at screens (ahem).
I’ve written about several manga still being serialized, and want to provide an update on how far along they are now.
Ghost Reaper Girl by Akissa Saiké (at viz.com) went on a hiatus from May 2022 until returning October 2023. I hope this fun artist is back in full health! I likely wrote when there were twenty-something chapters: now, the latest Chapter is 37. Chloe Love is winning battles and scaring her demonic enemies, which is funny when you realize she is fighting Cthulhu mythos-y sorts of characters.
Kaiju No. 8 by Naoya Matsumoto (at viz.com)had 54 chapters when I last wrote about it, and now has 97! The situation has… escalated into some very organized kaiju wars, and the defense forces may not be ready for monsters who can THINK. Many chapters are a few minutes in a single battle in the greater war – there is a whole lot of fighting going on, and each character is pushing themselves to succeed for their own reasons.
Spy x Family by Tatsuyo Endo (at viz.com) was at volume 58 when I wrote about it. At the moment (in late 2023) there are 91 chapters published at Viz.com, and we’ve seen each member of the family at their most skilled at what they do, plus workplace crushes, actual hostage situations, and inappropriate brotherly love.
I’m still reading each of these, and look forward to additional issues.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich audiobook published by HarperAudio 2021
This audiobook, read by the author, gets off to a rough start: people in bad situations are making bad decisions, and the wrongness of it all started to dissuade me from sticking with it… but the story turns!
After Tookie’s bad decisions lead to a long prison sentence, books help her survive incarceration, and lead her to seek a job at an indigenous bookstore in Minneapolis.
Her passion for books makes her an effective bookseller, and her love for a former tribal policeman gives her a warm home life. However, the survival of the bookshop – and everyone she cares about in and outside of it – is in doubt when the COVID pandemic hits.
An eventful year unfolds. Tookie meets her unexpected grandchild-in-law, a white customer dies and haunts the store (!) creating cultural difficulties in her discussions with her husband about ghosts and fear the customer was killed by something she read (!), she experiences the routine annoyance of white people badgering her and her colleagues with their we-were-the-good-guys family mythologies about indigenous people, and George Floyd is murdered nearby. The protests, and the solidarity from the Indigenous experience with police, made this year-in-the-life tale feel completely current.
Erdrich, who is Chippewa herself, spins a heartfelt story of a difficult year of an indigenous person with a criminal record trying to hold her life together. Tookie has had a gritty upbringing and has developed unusual expertise in saying the wrong thing, but her actions are always infused with caring, good intentions, and books.
Erdrich’s love of books comes through very clearly in the writing, and this is one of those fiction books that comes with its own recommended reading list! (I am pretending that I will someday get to the books on the list!). It also includes friendly-but-serious bickering between characters about wild rice preferences.
This book is an unconventional narrative that portrays one imperfect woman’s experiences of recent global and US events, the ongoing challenges of being a previously incarcerated person, the aggravations of midwestern racism, and getting along with in-laws, plus abundant and heartfelt book-love. The book’s title will shift in meaning as you read it.
This is the MOST FUN manga I’ve read in AGES.I laughed out loud! I squealed! I found myself impatient for new chapters! I have screenshots of the hot dad character saved on my phone! [*squeal*]
How on earth did this romance-action-comedy win me over, when I usually like my stories packed with sci-fi vehicles and dystopian struggles?
There are several good answers. CHARM. Enthusiasm. Humor. Artists who adore the characters they are drawing! COMEDY OUTTAKES and IN-HOUSE FAN ART AT THE END OF MANY CHAPTERS! Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to shout, but those are the areas where I have the highest squealing-and-screenshot ratio.
Background: Tappytoon.com is a website for manga / comics / “webtoons” authored in Korea, which are serialized and sold in chapters. A common theme across the romance and action comics on this site is that a contemporary young person works themselves to death in the REAL world, and wakes up as a character in a favorite book or video game. Rather than being the hero/ine, they (often) find themselves in the role of a doomed villain, and (having read the book or played the game that is the secret script for this world), set out to upend the story by making very different decisions to change their fate. These are stories of redemption, heroism, second chances, and (for the romance heroines) opportunities to learn selflessness to earn the love of all around them.
This webtoon is my favorite of this model so far!
Plot: Our rich, pretty, noble-title-bearing heroine, Juvellian, wakes up in her book role, knowing that she loves a man who will betray her, she has lost the affection of her widowed father, and that she is fated to die a horrible, lonely death in a dark place. She wakes in the timeline after she is established as a villain but before things go completely rotten, and she decides that she will DO BETTER.
She starts a program of self-improvement, shedding the man she has been chasing and painstakingly redeeming her terrible reputation one person at a time. She is sincere, and wants to survive!
Comedy in the story takes many forms: the heroine is terrified of small, cute animals, but not the things/people that are life-threatening; ongoing mistaken identity situations lead the heroine astray in her conspiracy to dodge a marriage to a murderous royal; there is abundant, awkward teen romance silliness; there are constant father-daughter misunderstandings; there are masks; an overprotective and supernaturally handsome father terrorizes his daughter’s suitors; we see the stresses of small animals from their own points of view…
I laughed out loud at this man’s fantasy of how his poorly communicated message would be received.
This is a period drama set in an imaginary version of [unspecified European place] so that everyone central to the plot can be rich, have too many fasteners on their clothing (a favorite theme of the illustrators!), live in palaces, have lots of idle time to get into trouble, AND can be at risk of execution by petulant local royals! There are politics, but also curses, vicious rumors, evil stepparents, very forbidden dungeons, poisons, neglected veterans, and rock-star-handsome knights.
The humor can be dry and very funny. Comedic, child-like (chibi) versions of the characters represent them in emotional moments. Cartoon wallpaper hovers behind them when they think they are being clever. There is overstatement, understatement, exaggeration, and so many other good humor-tools well applied.
This comic has teen-romance values: all the young ladies love the handsome knights because they are so “pure” (!?!), there is no kissing, nothing is racy, and marriages appear to be mostly made for class & political reasons. The heroine is very young, so the romance is a why-is-my-heart-racing, oh-gosh, how-did-I-never-notice-how-handsome-he-is slow path. And that’s fine! Both Juvelle and her eventual partner grow up and become better, braver, more responsible people during the events of this story.
There are giddy posts from other characters in the manga AND in our real world online about how handsome Legis Floyen (Juvellian’s father) is, and it was clear it was fun to draw him and his entourage. The artists’ giddiness is adorable (they love him in glasses, they love him at the beach, they love him with medallions…). I will show restraint, and share just one of those charming, in-house-fan-art images… with his shirt on. There are other favorite WHOLESOME images of Legis I could share, but they could hint at spoilers, and he is supposed to remain a mystery for many of the 123 chapters (!) I happily paid for. (Note that these comics are presented in English, but some fan sites used other translations, so Legis is Regis, Juvelle is Jubel, and the name of the comic itself has variations.)
Pinup Dad: Duke Legis Floyen
Any comic that keeps me reading for 123 chapters and can make me laugh out loud is a winner. This comic has so much going for it: high quality art (in color!) with lots of digital fabric textures, a brave and modern girl trying to set things right, action, curses, family secrets, monsters, garden parties, monsters at garden parties, ADORABLE characters, deathbed confessions, rivalries for the hot male lead title, excessive fasteners, and high stakes battles. It’s a winner! I love it! This team should hurry up and illustrate more stories about Legis so I can keep buying them!
Janine Vangool does many things well at Uppercase, and one of those is providing a video previewing every page of this book on here on this overview page! You know EXACTLY what you are getting before you order it! There are also non-video image spreads to show off selected contents. Go have a look.
This is a beautiful and hefty compilation of artist and manufacturer profiles relating to paper.
Paper sculptors, artists, watercolor paper manufacturers, paper cutters from multiple cultures (papel picado and Asian/international techniques), wet paper oragami artists, African paper bead makers, paper felt painters who form paper from poured colored fiber slurry… While I own multiple books about paper arts, this one has a greater breadth – famous and not famous, industrial and artisanal, Awagami Paper AND lone papermakers – and each profile is longer and more heavily illustrated than in most other such books, providing a better sense of each participant’s product range and/or creative practice. The caliber of the participants is high, and the range of content is impressive.
This is a very professionally produced collection of profiles, and I (a person who has visited paper-making museums in multiple countries!) enjoyed it very much.
These paintings show many types of structures, both traditional and modern, and have the same charm and attention to scale and detail that make Urbanowicz’ art so interesting. Unlike the store fronts, these are broader scenes and wider perspectives. (Yes, he works in anime also, and you can see how some of these could function as studies for both ordinary and extraordinary backgrounds for anime dramas.)
You can see scenes from the book at the artist’s website for this book:
“Okuradashi 2010-2021”「お蔵出し」 · Mateusz Urbanowicz
Home website of Mateusz Urbanowicz; artist, creator working in Japan.
I was happy to purchase this book at Kinokuniya (I can’t believe my SF store has already had a 50 year anniversary!), and appreciate Urbanowicz’ drawing styles, comments on watercolor pencils (I use them, so I laughed out loud), and the skill, sensitivity, and affection this artist has for his subjections.
If you loved Tokyo at Night, you might love this, too!
In a grim future, giant alien insects invade earth and violently devastate the population. A heroine appears to fight them; after her death, through risky experiments, the government imbues a group of orphans with her powers. These young people are humanity’s only defense against body-snatching and massacres by these aliens.
One day, another child appears, and seems to also have insect-battling abilities. How is that even possible? And will his arrival turn the tide so that humanity can finally win?
This is a dark tale of a brutal future where children with differently manifesting powers fight on behalf of people who both admire and ostracize their heroes for their freakish abilities. Meanwhile, the arrival of a new child suggests the government keeps strange secrets.
It is high stakes and somewhat dark in subject matter. Kids risking their lives to fight aliens (while adults… don’t) is a grim topic, though it gives them some agency, and they fight to win.
This was my first Tappytoon comic, and I found it well-paced, well drawn, and interesting.
Time traveling agents comb through battlefields in the aftermath of devastating wars, and gather intelligence to make adjustments in time and events so that their own side will win. But at one battlefield, there is a note. A taunting, gloating note. An invitation to the finder from a skilled strategic rival to… do what, exactly?
Whether it is a dare or a trap, communicating with the enemy is highly dangerous. And yet, elaborately coded exchanges between these professional rivals begin, woven and shaped through time, so that only a specific arch enemy will spot and interpret it.
And those communications are… thrilling.
Are communications with enemy rivals supposed to be thrilling? Are finding their cleverly devised codes supposed to make your not-necessarily-human heart race?
This is a well-acted, FUN, page-turner-if-this-had-pages story of rivalry, risk, intrigue, and mutual admiration that delighted me. I recommend it highly.
